I got an interesting comment on a YouTube video this week....

"If switching careers, would you eliminate your old career?"

Pretty harsh sentiment: "eliminate". But it kinda makes sense, after all, this person is probably switching from something that has nothing related to data.

Start over, right? Clean slate?

No, I would NEVER recommend anyone do this.

In fact, I'd do the opposite of "eliminate" your old career.

I'd embrace it.

I'd welcome it.

I'd honor it.

Because it's actually your super power. Let me explain with a personal story...

When I was at legendary oil company, ExxonMobil, they had these "hackathon" competitions for data analysis. They'd basically hand out a data set and ask anyone in the company to analyze it.

Anyone could participate. And if you won, you got a $1,000,000 prize.

I entered the contest & saw the competition. Most the professionals competing were data scientists and had Master's degrees or PhD's in Computer Science or Statistics.

I had a BS in Chemical Engineering.

How was I supposed to beat these guys? I had no shot.

Or at least, that's what I thought....

Fast forward to some epic data cleaning in Python and beautiful data viz in Tableau...

I won.

How did I win? To be honest, I wasn't better at data than a lot of the other competitors.

But I had a secret weapon that none of them had.

I was a Chemical Engineer.

I understood the domain 10x better than the next competitor. Heck, probably 20x better.

I knew oil properties. I knew chemistry. I knew that sulfur is really bad in your oil; something so simple for a chemical engineer, but felt like a foreign language to someone unfamiliar.

This allowed me 1) work faster, but 2) know what to analyze, and how to present it to the stakeholders.

This enabled me to have greater business impact, and ultimately win the $1,000,000 prize.

And okay, I may be exaggerating the size of the prize. It might have been a $50 gift card and ultimate bragging rights. But still.

The same applies to you!

When you're applying for jobs, you might not be the most talented data analyst that applies...

But if you embrace your background and apply for related data jobs to that industry, you'll understand the domain.

And often, that's MORE important than you data skills.

In fact, I had one hiring manager tell me, "I want our data hires to understand our domain. I can teach them Python or statistics, but teaching them the domain is much harder."

I hope this gives you hope and confidence.